1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image-based real time motion detection method and apparatus and an image processing apparatus and method for real time motion detection and more particularly to a hardware structure for analyzing an image captured by a camera and extracting motion information of an object that is present in the image in real time from the image.
2. Description of the Related Art
Since objects with various sizes and shapes are present in an image, it is very difficult to determine the direction or speed of the motion of each object present in the image. To determine motion of an object, in principle, it is necessary to check all pixels of a currently input image and one or more previously input images.
Since the method of checking all pixels requires repetitive calculations of a large amount of information and a large number of memory accesses, the method is not suitable for a general-purpose computer that is based on sequential processing and also significantly reduces overall system efficiency. Specifically, if the size of each image and the number of images input per second are increased, the amount of data to be processed is significantly increased and thus cannot be processed in real time in a system based on a general-purpose computer. Therefore, detection of motion of an object in an image captured by a camera is one of the most difficult challenges in image processing.
However, to obtain motion information in real time from a current image and one or more previous images, i.e., to obtain information of changed portions of an image, it is more desirable to use a method of simultaneously obtaining and processing images than to use a method in which, after all images are stored in an external memory, the images are sequentially read and processed from the memory. However, structurally, it is not possible for the system based on the general-purpose computer to implement such a processing method and thus the system inevitably employs inefficient processing, thereby causing a lot of problems in terms of cost, power, and size.